Our days never stop. I wake up with the perfect amount of time for me to get ready for work. I finish getting ready right in time to have three minutes to stop and kiss my wife and kids as I walk out the door. As I drive to work, I don’t even turn on music or a podcast because this feels like the only time for the next eight hours that I will sit in silence. I arrive at work and walk inside. I work consistently for eight or nine hours, depending on if I’m working through lunch.

While leaving work, I switch to thinking about how things are going at home. When I get there, we feed the babies. Since they are still so little, we wake them every three hours to feed them. That lasts however long, and then we start to make dinner. These days, we eat most of our old staples that only take twenty to thirty minutes to make. Once dinner is done, we break and prepare to feed the babies again. By this point, the exhaustion sets in and Taylor and I just sit and decompress from our days for the first time in twelve hours.

The point I’m trying to make by laying out my day is not that we are busier than others. This, in fact, is likely the situation for those around us too. Between work, our kid’s practice, and our own after work events, we are busy. We take pride in our busyness. But why? This has been a haunting question to ask myself recently. Why am I so busy? Why do I constantly allow myself to be busy? What benefit does this have?

These are the questions that flooded my mind as I began reading Portland pastor John Mark Comer’s new book The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry. In this book, Comer challenges the pride we often find in our daily struggle with the fast-paced, pointing to how counter-Christian this can be. At one point, he compares us to Martha, stating that we focus on the wrong things when the only thing we ought to focus on is Christ himself. As Christians in this age of busyness, we must be prepared to fight against the rush of society. This is a challenging yet refreshing concept. We must all ask ourselves - what’s the rush?